After listening to my speech, I am quite pleased with how I did. I felt like I did particularly well with remembering the structure of my speech and elaborating on each point, however this may just be because I am familiar with the points of my speech. I also did not use too many filler words, although there were a few, however I was worried that my whole speech would be riddled with filler words, and it was not. I think that my tone of voice and speed was mostly adequate, however I did notice that during the song at the beginning and in the conclusion paragraph I began to talk a bit too fast. My last major positive of my speech was the song, I think I played it pretty well and it provided a good hook and lead into the speech.

There are still a few things that I think could have been improved. As mentioned before, I think the use of filler words and the speed of the speech could have been done better, and I also think that eye contact might have been a problem. I was looking at everyone in the room, however I don’t think I actually made eye contact with anyone. Additionally, I relied on my notecard quite a bit, which I think was mostly fine, but I should try to limit it in the future. I should also be more intentional with my gestures and movement in future speeches; in this speech I stood sort of stiff and also just did random hand gestures without any real intent. In terms of content, I think the two main things that could have been improved were the connection between the song and the intro paragraph, and connecting lines from the second verse of the song to the main point about anti-war protests.

The first thing that happened that I wasn’t aware of was speeding up during the song and at the end of the speech, I guess that was because of nerves. Another thing I didn’t notice was that I looked to my right for the majority of the speech. Granted, most people were too my right, but from the camera’s perspective it seemed like I was always looking over there and maybe I wasn’t connecting with the people in front of me and to my left. Finally, I didn’t realize that I was making gestures and moving my hands, I was doing that subconsciously, which I actually think helped my speech a bit, but it would help in the future to have intentional gestures planned out.